SundaeSwap Launch & Recap

Now that we’re a little more than a week into the operation of the first AMM-based DEX in the Cardano ecosystem, we found ourselves with a brief moment to reflect on the past week. Don’t worry, we’re still hard at work optimizing how our protocol interacts with the blockchain to squeeze as much as we can out of it, and keeping the heat on the folks at Cardano to increase its limits to accommodate the massive demand for our services. But it’s a good time to reflect on where we are, and where we want to go.

TL;DR

The launch of SundaeSwap was a huge success which we are proud of. The network and the protocol held up with 100% uptime and zero network failure points. We expected congestion, and there was congestion. We have many awesome updates and improvements in the works to make the entire experience run smoother.

First of all, THANK YOU

The very first thing we need to do is thank the incredible efforts of our development team for the thousands of man-hours they have put into this project going into the launch, and their responsiveness to the needs of our users over the past few days. They put their blood, sweat and all-too-many tears into SundaeSwap, and it shows.

Of course, our developers wouldn’t be nearly so busy this past week if it weren’t for our incredible community, who have stood behind this project from the very beginning, as we have navigated — sometimes imperfectly — a rapidly evolving regulatory environment, partnership challenges and the (justifiably) conservative technical team in charge of the safe expansion of the Cardano blockchain. Throughout the previous few days and the last few months, your support was the main reason we kept pushing.

The Milestones

Of course, as you know, our launch was not all rainbows and butterflies, and we’ll address the areas of improvement and future plans in a moment. Before we do that, however, please allow us this opportunity to brag about some of our accomplishments.

This past week has been the start of a new era for Cardano. In its first week of operation, the SundaeSwap DEX has realized:

• $71.69 million TVL (total value locked)
• more than 300 active trading pools on the exchange
• 100% uptime
• No security issues

While we acknowledge that many of your trades are still waiting to get scooped and fulfilled, we’re also proud to say that every successfully submitted transaction on the SundaeSwap DEX reached the Cardano mempool, where all valid transactions await confirmation by the blockchain. And that brings us to our next topic:

Congestion

While the demand following our launch pushed the limits of both our own protocol and the Cardano network, it’s important to note that neither SundaeSwap nor Cardano experienced any downtime over the past many days. We were as ready as we could be. That said, however, the immediate demand we saw following launch was even higher than we anticipated, and the performance patterns we saw on the testnet were not perfectly mirrored on the mainnet due in part to differences in the number of participants, the times of highest demand, as well as in the number of active nodes on both networks.

The result of this was that while performance issues tapered off during the testnet period, they have yet to taper on the mainnet. We knew there would be tremendous amounts of load on the network. Still, even then, we saw a massive amount of traffic that we did not anticipate.

As we said at the beginning, our development team is working hard to squeeze as many transactions into a block as we can, and in a moment we’ll share at least one decision we’ve made to help with that. But more importantly, because frankly there is only so much we can do on the SundaeSwap protocol to optimize this, we are working closely with the team at IOG to safely accelerate the pace of parameter scaling on the Cardano mainnet to accommodate the now obvious demand for DeFi services on our blockchain.

Cardano is in the very beginning of scaling, and every blockchain has growing pains, whether that be in gas fees, network failures, or in our case, congestion. As we noted in our prep for mainnet blog post, we expected that there would be some delays as we ran up against the limit of the Cardano network parameters. We can assure you that IOG is very aware of the demand, and very aware of the pressure to increase parameters as quickly as possible, while still maintaining the highest standards of security available to the crypto world today.

Opportunities

We have taken your feedback to heart and are working on adjustments. Most of the feedback that we saw fell into three main categories: helping users access the protocol easier, providing more information to the user throughout the transaction so they can make more informed decisions, and optimizing the scripting and throughput as well as taking as much load as possible from the chain and the wallets.

To begin addressing this feedback, we will be rolling out some updates over the next few weeks and months that will drastically improve the Sundaeswap experience.

Some things you can expect coming up shortly are:

• APY indication for pools and farms
• More explicate pricing information and historical pricing information
• Visual stats on pools, including TVL and volume
• Overall price data improvements
• Expanded language base
• Changes in the protocol wallet relationship and wallet integration improvements
• Simplified cancellation requests
• And much, much more!

This list is only a representative one. Many more improvements and more integral protocol structure updates are in the works. Rest assured that we will be bringing some exciting updates to the protocol in the coming weeks and months.

This is all without mentioning the consistent updates to the network through parameter changes and CIPs that we are working closely with IOG on.

We are super excited about the upcoming parameter changes that are coming. We hope to continue taking on an active role in growing the ecosystem and the network.